Club Velvet

Her melons each have a name—Annabel and Lenore. Round, ripe, ripping through her shredded T-shirt, one bears a pierced nipple, the other a raven tattoo. These ornaments came courtesy of Lucky Thirteen. When Virginia flexes her pecs, the inky raven flies. She swears she only dances, but they ask for more. Not just tonight, but always and with cash in hand. They dream of drugged ecstasy, however fleeting. And she dreams of a three-bedroom in Midlothian. Today she is 20, tomorrow she is 40, never older. One day she'll swallow enough pills to turn blue. She will die without ever knowing that Eddie once wrote at a desk directly above her pole.Note: The office of The Southern Literary Messenger, the Richmond, Virginia-based magazine where Edgar Allen Poe served as editor, is now home to a strip club. That is to say the site, not the actual building.

When I Turn Into Moon

My mother always cut her hair on a blue moon there in the kitchen an ashtray resting on her knee—Cradled, Madonna of Bruges She said it was luck that kept her here and superstition. Her hair, a bed of red and gold occupied a space between the dirt and heaven and me on the ground at her feet all dirty dark brown rat’s nest viewed her hair as a bridge to the night. When I turn into moon She, a moth Will rise to me That red turned silver like some alchemist’s trick. Reds that weren’t quite her’s that held chemical-like secrets and cigarette smoke Usurped its place In frustration and grief She sheered it all off beneath the dark of the moon, conjuring black magic in her desperation till I could not recognize her in her metamorphosis.

When I turn into moon She, a moth Will rise to me I remember the day my father died. My mother on the floor, pleading to a forgotten god trying to bribe her way into heaven. They rushed me out of the room then before I could breathe moonlight back into her. Sometimes now, I cut my hair on a blue moon. Sitting on the kitchen floor, scissors gnawing unevenly, I wait patiently for each fallen strand to turn red and gold, to become a bridge to the night.

When I turn into moon She, my mother Will rise to me

Sydnee Wagner is a closet poet and a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, studying Renaissance literature and ecofeminism. Though seemingly busied by her research and art, she still manages to find time to drink copious amounts of coffee and peruse the Internet for funny videos to send to her friends. Sydnee’s poetry serves as a platform for her to explore her relationship with her mother, ethnicity, and sexual abuse, among other things that inspire her during bouts of insomnia.

Homebound, Part II

Grace Carpenter is a Michigan based artist from the sleepy suburbs of Westland. Born in 1992, she has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. Using Adobe Illustrator, Grace creates charming and humorous illustrations that spread smiles.#Illustration #Series #Comic #Sequential #GraceCarpenter #Home #Homebound #Adventure #Journey Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Without A World

I took the map down from the wall. It no longer had the staying power. The glue weakened. Though the place is bare in the absence of a world, I am afforded more ease in staring at the plaster – an unassuming, white void that for months hid behind the colored continents and their precious divisions. Grateful to have things return to normal. A bare room, where I can “find myself.”

It's Not Funny If I Explain It

“You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” - Graham GreeneDiandra Devlin had her reasons for always wearing a suit.

For one thing, the suit—usually a vintage black double-breasted number with a white pinstripe and lapels you could cut yourself on, sometimes with a red carnation in the lapel on days she felt particularly fancy—was always all anyone remembered about her when the cops asked about her. It was kind of astonishing how effective that was, because there were plenty of other things about her that probably would have been helpful to the investigation: she was fat, looked to be in her late twenties, had one green eye and one blue eye and a noticeable diagonal scar on her chin. But put a woman in men’s clothes and the person underneath just slips on by sometimesShe didn’t seem to have a particular region she kept to. People reported seeing the woman in the suit everywhere from South Florida, where she wore a white flannel three-piece and a Panama hat, to as far north as Buffalo, where she was usually described as wearing red gloves and a black, fur-collared overcoat. For all anyone knew, she wasn’t even restricted to the United States. In Ciudad Juarez, a cartel lieutenant who was known for beating up prostitutes if they wouldn’t mule his product went home from the cantina one evening with a white woman the locals said was dressed “like a movie gangster” and was never heard from again. The sheer distance she would have had to cover led many local police departments to eventually decide the woman in the suit didn’t actually exist. She was on the FBI’s radar, but the only person assigned to the file was a 70-year-old man who hadn’t been allotted enough of a travel budget to go to half the places she’d been sighted.

In the more credulous regions she passed through, there were people who whispered that she was something other than human entirely, a demon or an avenging angel or some variation on the Erinyes of Greek myth, the furies who relentlessly pursued the unpunished sinner to the point of madness. Sometimes a skeptic would point out that it hardly sounded right for no one to remember what an angel or a devil looked like, to which they would respond that that was probably deliberate, some sacred or profane joke.

Visual Therapy

As an exploration of self, the crux of my illustrations hinges on the characterization of my own self-deprecating psychology and reluctant-to-bloom sexuality. I seek to reach viewers on an emotional level, specifically wherein they might recognize (and identify with) the feelings associated with criticism, sensitivity, vulnerability, exasperation, fear, and anxiety conveyed in my pieces. I employ my nagging compulsion for self-expression, and a combination of inks, pencils, and paint as an outlet for my so-called demons; as a visual therapy, not just for myself, but for any viewers, as well.

Nichole (Nic) Daniels was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She moved to Southern California in 2010 to attend California State University Long Beach, where she graduated with her BFA in Illustration in December 2013.

Flora, muse, enchant us all.Catch us in your endless thrall;Help us raise your celestial call,And bright’n these days after the Fall. To Gaia’s bounty we must turn,If we ever hope to learnThe beauty, power, love, and joy,That Nature offers as a toy.

The Mysterious Smoking Bear

The Mysterious Smoking Bear is a 365-day moving image + audio series by John Zhao documenting 2014 AD. Each day’s uploaded film will be compiled of footage taken within its own 24 hours. The goal is to have no goal other than to perhaps find a little bit of poetry in each turn of the sun; to allow filmmaking to become as natural as breathing, to create disposable images and be true to the mood of the day.

Martinez The Pescado

Carlos Martinez sat tired in his wheelchair, on the edge of the fishing boat. He did not understand why after so few years he’d returned to such a condition. His beautiful wife had left him, his magnificent home was sold, and his employees who had despised him now had reason to after they were dismissed. His father was stood on one side of the boat, happy to have him back. Just one week prior, Carlos Martinez had been running, with ninety-thousand fans chanting his name. Now he sat immobile in his wheelchair, legless. Carlos had not always been a star; in fact he had not always had legs. Barcelona FC, that was his dream, it was the role every boy in his village dreamed of: playing football for what they believed was the greatest team in the world. Yet Carlos was chair-bound until the age of seventeen. The other village boys would often mock him, calling him ‘el pescado’ meaning ‘the fish.' Carlos had gained this name for two reasons. Firstly, because he was not able to walk and if he fell from his pitiable wheelchair, he would panic and therefore writhe and squirm on the floor, like a fish does whilst fecklessly attempting to return to the water. The second reason for this name was due to the smell Carlos emitted. Often Carlos would smell of fish, the sea and the salt regularly dried into his clothes. His father was a fisherman, searching for Marlin or dolphin in the gulf. He would leave his gaff and hook and overcoat, amongst other items of his occupation, in Carlos’ bedroom. This was because there was not enough space in the terracotta house for his father to leave his things elsewhere.One afternoon, Carlos’ father returned from a two-day excursion where he had not managed to catch anything. The sea had been most unkind, he explained. The marlins were too tired he said, and the heat had been unbearable. The sharks however were hungry, and he had managed to get one into the boat using two gaffs. Carlos followed his father out to the boat where the shark laid, its dark eyes like chunks of coal sunken in its skin. It was when Carlos’ father gutted the monster that they discovered it had failed to devour a human, and recently. Amongst half an oxygen tank, the legs and groin of a diver fell from the opening in the shark; these would soon become the legs Carlos Martinez would be world renowned for.

The doctor had refused at first, it was an outlandish procedure for him to perform, let alone for Carlos to desire. However, ego is a great thing. Understanding he would be recognised globally as a surgical genius, the doctor eventually agreed. He performed the procedure in the hope that he would be granted fame. Should it work, he would be the man who gave the gift of walking.